Teamwork

People have been working effectively as teams ever since mankind started hunting any game larger than a hedgehog—survival depended upon it.  Despite the natural self-centredness of our species, families and clans were the natural basis of  the socialisation essential to effective co-ordination of human activity.The modern obsession with team-building is in part a reflection of the modern welfare state: we no longer have to worry about starving or freezing to death.  It has allowed each and every one of us to live in our own little bubble, coming out when we choose, and co-operating with others only when we need to.  With social networking, this may be getting worse .However, our urban gangs demonstrate that our children are quite capable of  ’teamworking’ out of school hours.    We saw this teamwork in action during the recent riots.Alas, these same children appear to be utterly incapable of working in teams for any legal purpose.  Putting them around a school-desk and giving them group projects does nothing whatever to promote teamwork, no more than can you build a community just by calling it a community.  If we’re lucky, the swots will do all the work, and the rest will just copy.  If we aren’t, they’ll spend all their time sending text messages or playing on their X-boxes.Although we may like to think of teams as democratic institutions where everyone is equal, we all know this isn’t the way things work in the real world.  Teams that work effectively have good leadership, even if the leaders are not formally designated as such.

Effective teams are also highly skilled and motivated.  Leaders know the extent to which they can count on individuals to act on their own initiative.  Good leaders don’t spend all their time telling everyone what to do—they foster initiative and devolve authority.  But they are there when they are needed—when things go wrong.

By far the easiest and most effective means of motivating pupils to work in teams is competition .